By Tony Blair
Faith matters. Even if you are not of religious faith yourself. Over 4 billion people world-wide recognize themselves as religious. They may not attend an organized place of worship. But Faith plays a part in their lives. A recent poll found that religion is important for around 30-35% of people in Europe, 65% of Americans and for about 90% of people in most Muslim-majority countries.
I started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation because I believe the modern world cannot work unless people from different faiths and cultures learn to live in peaceful co-existence with each other. Understanding increases the possibility of peace. Ignorance increases the potential for division.
The reason this is so important today is that globalization is shrinking the space we live in, making us share it, pushing people together in a way that is unique in human history. Some dislike this process. Some, like me, are content and even welcome it. But, for sure, it is a fact.
In this world, if religious faith becomes a counter force to this process, one which pulls people apart, then it becomes reactionary and divisive. So if I define myself as a Christian in opposition to you as a Muslim, then just as we are forced to live together by globalization, so we are forced apart by a view of religious faith that is exclusionary and hostile to those of a different faith to our own.
Apostasy
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation works in a number of ways to prevent this happening. One way is an inter-faith encounter through action, which is why we are supporting the UN anti-malaria campaign, to mobilize the faith communities to become centres of distribution for bed nets and medicines in Africa. We work also for reconciliation where religion is a dimension in political conflict, as in the Middle East. A key part of our work is education. In partnership with Yale University in the United States we now have a 'Faith and Globalization' course which began last year. This is now being extended to four other universities world-wide.
Now we are adding a new dimension: an education program linking up schools across the globe and across the faith divide. Launching officially today is Face to Faith, the new global schools project from my Foundation, designed to encourage young people of different faiths to learn directly with, from and about each other. Through structured video-conferencing, an online community and a course syllabus, Face to Faith gets secondary school students from across the world working together, investigating big global issues; sharing their own opinions, values and beliefs; and exploring the reasons for similar and different views. In this way, Face to Faith encourages young people to recognize the similarities between faiths but also, importantly, to respect and deal with the differences between diverse and often conflicting worldviews, helping to equip them to live in a global society made up of different faiths and beliefs."...more
